Hi there, I have a Toshiba Satellite A70, and really would not mind having the
standby feature working. Windows manages this regularly. It asks what should trigger the standby mode, such as the FN+F3 key, or the power buttong being pressed. I was wondering if anyone has gotten this to work on a comparable laptop. Thanks!!

The stanby "works" (notice the double quote) on my Toshiba Satellite 2250CDT. Was quite a mess to setup in fact and it only works well with newer kernel (but hibernation only work with older kernel... I have to choose).

You probably already have what you need in kernel (ACPI power states), you might already try to standby using : echo "standby" > /sys/power/state
If you don't have power state, you will need to recompile your kernel. But dont expect it to work well the first time unless you are really lucky, it is quite buggy, still.

Then you might want to try suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk. If nothing work (or if you want it anyways) it is still possible to install an optionnal kernel patch called swsusp2 to support hibernation. It used to work quite well on my laptop (until kernel 2.6.8.1).

I suggest you to start with a good search on google. Simple search like "linux power state acpi" should get you lot of good documentation.

Im not as picky about hibernate, but standby would be _wonderful_.
Would echoing "standby" into that 'file' actually initiate it?

Yup, if your kernel support it.
Linux is quite "simple".
/proc and /sys aren't real "directories" and "filse" as you probably thought, they exist only in memory and they permit to get information and to change some settings in the running kernel (allowing you to make very sentive change without reboot).

Anyways, echoing "standby" in that file (you can also try "echo 1 > /proc/acpi/sleep" ) will tell the kernel to enter standby mode. To bring it back, press power. It might not work or be very buggy, still.

Hi again, I tried initiating standby by echoing standby into /sys/power/state, but after the echo command, nothing happend. I tried the other way, but the 'file' sleep does not exist. I have enabled all of the ACPI options in the kernel though...Any thoughts?